The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

by Patrick Lencioni

This requires that a leader risk losing face in front of the team, so that subordinates will take the same risk themselves.

team leaders must create an environment that does not pun...

displays of vulnerability on the part of a team leader must be genuine; they cannot be staged. One of the best ways to lose the trust of a team is to feign vulnerability in order to manipulate the emotions of others.

By building trust, a team makes conflict possible because team members do not hesitate to engage in passionate and sometimes emotional debate, knowing that they will not be punished for saying something that might otherwise be interpreted as destructive or critical.

All great relationships, the ones that last over time, require productive conflict in order to grow. This is true in marriage, parenthood, friendship, and certainly business.

the higher you go up the management chain, the more you find people spending inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to avoid the kind of passionate debates that are essential to any great team.

It is important to distinguish productive ideological conflict from destructive fighting and interpersonal politics.

Ideological conflict is limited to concepts and ideas, and avoids personality-focuse...

teams that avoid ideological conflict often do so in order to avoid hurting team members' feelings, and then end up encouraging dangerous tension.

When team members do not openly debate and disagree about important ideas, they often turn to back-channel personal attacks, which are far nastier and more harmful than any heated argument over issues.

The first step is acknowledging that conflict is productive, and that many teams have a tendency to avoid it.

Mining Members of teams that tend to avoid conflict must occasionally assume the role of a “miner of conflict”—someone who extracts buried disagreements within the team and sheds the light of day on them.

In the process of mining for conflict, team members need to coach one another not to retreat from healthy debate.

Another tool that specifically relates to conflict is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, commonly referred to as the TKI.

One of the most difficult challenges that a leader faces in promoting healthy conflict is the desire to protect members from harm.

This leads to premature interruption of disagreements, and prevents team members from developing coping skills for dealing with conflict themselves.

Therefore, it is key that leaders demonstrate restraint when their people engage in conflict, and allow resolution to occur naturally, as messy as it can sometimes be.

many leaders feel that they are somehow failing in their jobs by losing control of their teams during conflict.

By engaging in productive conflict and tapping into team members' perspectives and opinions, a team can confidently commit and buy in to a decision knowing that they have benefited from everyone's ideas.

commitment is a function of two things: clarity and buy-in.

Great teams make clear and timely decisions and move forward with complete buy-in from every member of the team, even those who voted against the decision.

Great teams understand the danger of seeking consensus, and find ways to achieve buy-in even when complete agreement is impossible.

reasonable human beings do not need to get their way in order to support a decision, but only need to know that their opinions have been heard and considered.

a decision is better than no decision.

it is better to make a decision boldly and be wrong—and then change direction with equal boldness—than it is to waffle.

one of the greatest consequences for an executive team that does not commit to clear decisions is unresolvable discord deeper in the organization.

maximize clarity and achieve buy-in, and resisting the lure of consensus or certainty.

At the end of a staff meeting or off-site, a team should explicitly review the key decisions made during the meeting, and agree on what needs to be communicated to employees or other constituencies about those decisions. What often happens during this exercise is that members of the team learn that they are not all on the same page

one of the best tools for ensuring commitment is the use of clear deadlines for when decisions will be made, and honoring those dates with discipline and rigidity.

timing is one of the most critical factors that must be made clear.

committing to deadlines for intermediate decisions and milestones is just as important as final deadlines, because it ensures that misalignment among team members is identifi...

the leader must be comfortable with the prospect of making a decision that ultimately turns out to be wrong.

the leader must be constantly pushing the group for closure around issues, as well as adherence to schedules that the team has set.

it refers specifically to the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team.

unwillingness of team members to tolerate the interpersonal discomfort that accompanies calling a peer on his or her behavior and the more general tendency to avoid difficult conversations.

team members who are particularly close to one another sometimes hesitate to hold one another accountable precisely because they fear jeopardizing a valuable personal relationship.

Members of great teams improve their relationships by holding one another accountable, thus demonstrating that they respect each other and have high expectations for one another's performance.

the most effective and efficient means of maintaining high standards of performance on a team is peer pressure.

there is nothing like the fear of letting down respected teammates that motivates people to improve their performance.

Identifies potential problems quickly by questioning one another's approaches without hesitation

A good way to make it easier for team members to hold one another accountable is to clarify publicly exactly what the team needs to achieve, who needs to deliver what, and how everyone must behave in order to succeed.

The enemy of accountability is ambiguity,

Team members should regularly communicate with one another, either verbally or in written form, about how they feel their teammates are doing against stated objectives and standards.

By shifting rewards away from individual performance to team achievement, the team can create a culture of accountability.

This occurs because a team is unlikely to stand by quietly and fail because a peer is not pulling his or her weight.

Sometimes strong leaders naturally create an accountability vacuum within the team, leaving themselves as the only source of discipline.

If teammates are not being held accountable for their contributions, they will be more likely to turn their attention to their own needs, and to the advancement of themselves or their departments.

An absence of accountability is an invitation to team members to shift their attention to areas other than collective results.

Political groups, academic departments, and prestigious companies are also susceptible to this dysfunction, as they often see success in merely being associated with their special organizations.

This refers to the familiar tendency of people to focus on enhancing their own positions or career prospects at the expense of their team.